Our Journey to Paperless: Design

Document Management System: Capture Desktop | Main Page | After Design: Document Management System Implementation

For the most part, document management is divided into three types: transactions, people and library.

Accounting has transaction documents. Someone is either buying, selling or getting paid. Human Resources has people documents, which they track for compliance. Library documents require a description to find the files once they are electronic.

OCR (optical character recognition) may be the best way to find these documents so that you track words instead of indexes.

How and when do you start file storage online? Also, how and when do you want to scan to convert to electronic documents?
Always keep in mind that the sooner you file the paper and destroy it, the cheaper it will be to retain. (And beautify your cabinets!)
When filing paper, we file it over and over again. However, when we convert to electronic documents, it is filed once and stays filed no matter how many times it is retrieved.

When do I have to retrieve?
There are two reasons people have to look at the paper as opposed to the data. They pull paper to either answer questions or prove something.

When we design a conversion project, we need to refine what we do now and base it on 3D search capabilities.
What are the indexes that need to be drilled down to the document in order to be seen?
The date and the document types are standard indexes in every project. If I want to see every I-9 I have signed for 2012, I need a date range feature and a document type of I-9. If I do not have those indexes I will have to look at every file like I do in paper.

That is plenty for this week and I hope it gets us going in the right direction.